So you can’t live without your local news, right? Oh, you can? Okay, well what about sports? News Corp. president and COO Chase Carey will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow ready to make a not-so-subtle threat to lawmakers on the Senate Subcommittee on Communications: cable companies will simply have to pay more to broadcasters (like, for instance, Fox) or you can pretty much forget about catching your goofy weather guy before going to bed at night. And no more football, either.

The FCC – yes, that FCC – live-tweeted today’s playoff game between the San Francisco Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies – expressly for Cablevision customers who could not view it.

The rift between Cablevision and News Corp continues as the latter has now pulled the plug on the local New York Fox affiliates, Fox 5 and My9, which it owns. They are now also threatening to pull several other channels under their power, though the larger channels like Fox News are as yet unaffected. If they don’t settle today, however, subscribers will miss the first game of baseball’s National League Championship Series.

Mediaite was the first to suggest that binding arbitration could be a solution to the brewing conflict between cable provider Cablevision and News Corp. over renewing their contract and carriage fees. Cablevision has agreed to the suggestion of binding arbitration put forth by Rep. Peter King and Steve Israel to resolve the dispute, but News Corp. did not. Perhaps that will change now that a bipartisan collection of 27 legislators have joined the call for binding arbitration.

With the fight between Fox and Cablevision quickly approaching tomorrow night’s midnight deadline, is binding arbitration the answer to the growing annoyance of feuds between TV networks and cable companies? Congressmen Steve Israel and Peter King of New York think so, and they might be the right.

Foster Kamer is a pretty great writer, and the Village Voice was likely thrilled to hire him from Gawker a couple of months ago. But in hindsight it appears that his first few weeks at his new job were pretty rough. How rough? Well…he may have cost them $1,000,000 by writing a post that made a nasty comment about James Dolan, the prickly owner of Cablevision, MSG Entertainment, and Rainbow Media. It sort of puts any new-job growing pains we’ve all had in perspective, doesn’t it?

Well that’s one way to end a dispute: Tonight Cablevision will be offering their subscribers exclusive On Demand movies at no charge, including Academy Award nominees The Hurt Locker and District 9. This of course, is in response to the fact that they won’t be able to show the Oscars themselves, due to a last-minute breakdown in negotiations with ABC.

By now you may have heard that Cablevision may be unable to show the Oscar broadcast, after a fight between the television provider and The Walt Disney Company fell through. Which might not be so big of a deal, except that um, Disney has WABC, the station that showcases the Academy Awards.

There’s really no way to spin this that does not make it both bad and embarrassing: Newsday.com has 35 subscribers. Meaning I suppose, that not everyone’s parents who works at the paper has bother to cough up the $5/week. Kidding! They probably already subscribe to the print version and therefore get online access for free.

Relying on the cult viewership of one of its most popular shows, Iron Chef America, Food Network had literally been plugging its Iron “Super Chef” Battle complete with secret guest judge and ingredient of “national importance” (spoiler: Michelle Obama and White House garden veggies) online and on TV for months when their airwaves in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut went blank. Actually they didn’t go blank – but that’s just the beginning of the story.

A new column in Newsweek by Daniel Gross examines the new wave of “old-school cable slugfests,” including, but not limited to “Rupert Murdoch vs. the bureaucrats of Time Warner; Scripps vs. the unpredictable Dolans of Cablevision; content vs. distribution.” They’re a sign of things to come, he writes, but they will also hurt consumers, who will be asked to pay more and more for products that are becoming free. Confusing, right?

Ever since the NFL Network launched in 2003, there seemingly hasn’t been a moment it wasn’t embroiled in controversy involving its relationship with at least one major cable company. It ended a protracted standoff with Comcast earlier this year (though some Comcast subscribers already had the network), They’re still doing plenty of fighting, however, most prominently with Time Warner.